


Words Mean Things

by crossingwinter



Series: Reylo Giveaways [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:35:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23251027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: She doesn’t always mine conversations with him for fic, but sometimes it’s cathartic.  Instead of arguing with him about how some sales tactics are both unprofessional and uncalled for, she can have Kira tear Randy a new asshole and get her kicks that way.  Possibly the only good thing about having Ben Solo around is that he’s a good inspiration for her Randys.  They even look something alike, even if Ben has dark hair where Randy is blond.  She supposes she shouldn’t be complaining—she did get to work on her fic a bit.—In which Ben finds Rey's fic and things start getting very real.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Reylo Giveaways [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1660294
Comments: 79
Kudos: 444





	Words Mean Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HarleyQuinn1317](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarleyQuinn1317/gifts).



> I did a giveaway as a celebration for officially having more than 100 Reylo fics on AO3! This is the first of those three giveaways!

_ “You’re a monster,” Kira spits at him, her eyes flashing, her lips drawn back in a feral growl.  _

_ “Yes, I am,” Randy replies, stepping towards her, his obsidian eyes glinting with malice in the darkness. Kira could reach a hand out, strangle him. She wants to, for what he did to his father. _

_ But the Force has other ideas. _

The door bangs open and Rey’s eyes lift from her computer screen. It’s a dumb AU she’s writing—a Space Battles fusion that she’s been meaning to write for ages. Ages, and ages, but it’s been hard to find the time with the new job. Suddenly her working hours have been spent going to actual sales meetings and making sales pitches, and not sitting endlessly bored at her desk. She likes the pay bump, likes the vote of confidence from leadership, but she misses being able to spit out thousands and thousands of words of fanfiction at her desk.

And she really doesn’t like that they keep putting her on sales assignments with Ben Fucking Solo.

Who is walking through the door now in a suit that probably costs more than her monthly rent.  _ Look the part, that’s what my grandmother always said,  _ he’d told her on their first field assignment when Rey had thought she’d looked plenty nice in her Banana Republic, but Ben had had other ideas. 

“You’re late,” she grunts at him.

He checks his watch—because he wears a wristwatch. A nice one, too, probably.  _ If you do your job well, you’ll make three times your base pay in commission every month, like Solo,  _ Poe had told her cheerily. “I’m early.”

“We were going to meet ten minutes ago to go over the presentation,” she said.

“Were we?”

“I sent an email.”

He pulls out his phone and clicks into an app. “So you did,” he says. He doesn’t apologize.

_ “You’re a monster,”  _ she’d one shouted at him after a particularly belligerent sales call. He’d decided, halfway through, that he was taking no prisoners and had started behaving in such an unnecessarily aggressive way that Rey was positive that he had bullied the account rep he was trying to sell to into a complete package with FO.

_ “Yes, I am,”  _ he’d replied with no guilt at all. If anything, it looked like he, confusingly, believed every condemnation she was throwing at him. 

At least he agreed he’s an asshole. 

Not that it changed his behavior. 

And she doesn’t always mine conversations with him for fic, but sometimes it’s cathartic. Instead of arguing with him about how some sales tactics are both unprofessional and uncalled for, she can have Kira tear Randy a new asshole and get her kicks that way. Possibly the only good thing about having Ben Solo around is that he’s a good inspiration for her Randys. They even look something alike, even if Ben has dark hair where Randy is blond. She supposes she shouldn’t be complaining—she did get to work on her fic a bit.

“What do you want to go over?” he asks her, sounding bored. He settles into a chair and lifts the paper mug of coffee he’d been carrying up to his lips. 

“The presentation is different from last time, and I wanted to go over transitions,” she tells him, reaching for the HDMI cord to plug her computer into the projector.

Rey’s work computer is old. She gets a new one in six months if she’s still at the company, but this one is definitely starting to flag. For one thing, it takes a good two minutes to turn on these days, but more importantly it freezes every time she plugs it into a new monitor. 

And this projector—well it is definitely a new monitor. She hasn’t set it up to extend her desktop display and so…

She feels like she’s going to be sick as Ben Solo’s eyes land on the google doc she’d been writing in and her computer’s mouse turns into a rainbow wheel of frozen doom as he reads.

Rey wonders briefly what would happen if she threw her computer out a window. She wonders what would happen if her nose started bleeding, if she projectile vomited all over Ben Solo’s fancy expensive leather shoes.

But she’ll never find out.

“Did you write this?” Ben asks.

The mouse remains, stubbornly, a rainbow pinwheel.

Rey doesn’t reply.  _ Move _ , she wills the mouse.  _ Let me click let me click let me click. _

“It’s not very good,” he says and her eyes shoot up to look at him. He’s still reading, his coffee now on the table in front of him, his head cocked, his arms crossed over his chest. “I mean,” he adds. “The prose is fine. Engaging. But but structurally speaking it’s a little lacking and you’re not doing a good job at capturing the sexual tension here.”

“There is no sexual tension,” Rey snaps at once. She is  _ not _ a Kirandy. She thinks Kira is going to kill him in the next movie. He’s a villain—a self professed monster. He  _ tortured _ her.

“Oh,” Ben continues. “That’s not clear then. You should probably take out verbs like  _ flashing _ .” He pauses. “And describing his eyes as obsidian. That’s too exotic a—”

The mouse turns into a mouse and Rey minimizes the screen.

“—word for anyone’s eyes you don’t want your character to be fucking.” He keeps talking as though she’s not hurrying out of the room, keeps talking as though she’s not slamming the door shut the way he’d slammed it open, as though she wants to hear a dumb word coming out of his dumb mouth.

She locks herself in the bathroom before bursting into tears. “I do this for fun,” she tells her mirror. She’s not an idiot—she knows she’s never going to make money off fanfiction. She’s going to make money because she’s going to be as bloodthirsty a salesperson as Ben Solo, and make three times her base pay off commission. Or at least, she’s going to be as much of a bloodthirsty salesperson it is possible to be and still have a soul, which Ben Solo has never demonstrated having, and certainly doesn’t incorporate into his sales tactics, even if he gives the company and the rest of the sales team a bad reputation. “I work with Betas. People  _ like  _ my work.”

They do, after all. She gets nice reviews from people, she gets a decent amount of engagement on social media. She doesn’t need to love her job because she has fanfiction to keep her happy, keep her stimulated.

She didn’t  _ ask _ for Ben Fucking Solo to go and read her work without her permisison and then start giving her criticism. She doesn’t  _ care  _ what he thinks.

So why is she crying?

“We’re just going to pretend it never happened,” she tells herself when she’s able to stop with the deep, gulping, sobby breaths. “We’re just going to pretend that it’s just something I was doing to pass the time. It was. It’s not fandom, or a novel, or…”

There was  _ no  _ sexual tension between Randy and Kira. Especially not if she was using  _ Ben Fucking Solo _ as a base for the writing.

Ew.

Thank fuck he doesn’t fandom. He had looked confused when she’d talked about the new trailer during a team meeting and hadn’t even seen the first movie.

She washes her face and returns to the conference room. Ben has finished his coffee and is watching her closely as she comes in. There’s something different about the way he’s standing. Usually, when she sees him, he looks like he’s going to take over the galaxy, like he’s going to rule the room. Now, though, his posture is softer, somehow. He’s taking pity on her.

It’s infuriating.

“So,” she says crisply. “At the end of slide five—”

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

She ignores him.

“—we have last year’s results in line with the year before’s. Do we want to discuss our KPIs? I know that marketing took the slide out, but I think it’s still good background information to have, and we can look smart by having it off the top of our heads.”

Ben looks at her for a long moment.

“Yeah, go for it. Just say my name when it’s my turn to talk.”

“You got it.”

-

_ This reads like a Kirandy wrote it, _ is the first review that she gets on her chapter update.  _ Why are you fixating on his eyes so much? He’s a murderer rapist asshole motherfucker. _

She’s shaking as she sits at the airport, staring at the words in her email inbox. 

Maybe she should just abandon this fic. Orphan it completely. Ben Solo saw it and told her it was bad, and now people are acting as though she’s a secret Kirandy or something. Maybe it was because she’d called his eyes obsidian, like Ben said. Ben has obsidian eyes.

She can feel her face crumpling and she tries to open up her google doc to keep working on her fic but she can’t. It doesn’t work. The words aren’t there anymore. It’s not fun, it’s not cathartic. She has become the punching bag.

“Coke?” Ben asks out of nowhere and she almost jumps out of her skin. He’s handing her a Diet Coke. 

“Thanks,” she says, taking it from him, and popping the top off.

The Coke helps a little bit. It’s comforting. She always drinks Diet Coke, and the familiarity of the taste of it is pulling her out of her head.

She tabs away from her google doc, away from her email. She opens a fresh document and sits there, wondering what would happen if she  _ did _ take Ben up on the feedback that she should fix the sexual tension in the scene.

-

The flames keep coming. More and more people who think she’s getting a little too close to Kirandy in her fic. Words like  _ disappointing _ and  _ gross  _ and  _ you’re better than this _ keep hitting her inbox at unexpected times and she feels close to tears for a good chunk of the week.

“Fuck them  _ all _ ,” she growls into her pillow one night. Do they forget that she’s a person? And sure, maybe she’s not the  _ best  _ writer, but they don’t need to be mean to her, or threaten to block her if she doesn’t turn it around, or...or whatever’s next. Apparently people are talking about her chapter update a lot right now—according to Rose, who betas for her most of the time—and where ordinarily any lip service is good publicity, Rey suspects they’re all fanning the flames.

_ I just got promoted, _ she reminds herself when what feels like the hundredth flame comes through to her email inbox.  _ I have already met my goals for the month.  _

And Ben had said her prose was good, before shredding what she’d written.

So maybe the story’s bad but she’s still—

She’s not a bad writer.

She’s not a bad writer.

She’s not a bad writer.

She repeats it like a mantra. Mantras are helpful. They’ve helped her get to sleep for years.  _ My parents are coming back for me _ ,  _ my parents are coming back for me, my parents are coming back for me. _

Her parents hadn’t come back for her. They had been—she’d been able to declare after a long session with her therapist—utter fuckwits. But this mantra is different from that one. That one had been about what she’d thought she’d deserved. This is about what she  _ is _ .

And she is  _ not  _ a bad writer.

-

_ rey#7257: tell me not to post this _

_ finn#2187: post what? _

_ rey#7257: ```Hey everyone. Thanks for your lovely reviews. They made me cry. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a real live person with feelings. And yeah, I get it—you don’t like a fictional character/ship. _I don’t like that character/ship either._ But I also try to remember that the people I engage with on the internet are people too. Don’t be everything the Kirandys say we are. Don’t judge my story before it’s done, please. And if you don’t like it, you can close the tab.``` _

_ finn#2187: I think it’ll go over their heads and it’ll maybe make it worse. _

_ rey#7257: yeah I thought you might say that. _

_ rey#7257: :/ _

“Rey?” 

She minimizes Discord at once. Ben Solo is standing there, holding another Diet Coke which he hands her. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Dangerous,” Rey blurts out and he gives her a look like he can’t tell if she was joking or not. She can’t tell if she was joking or not either.

“Your novel—or story—or whatever it was—”

“Listen, we don’t have to talk about this.”

“I’m trying to apologize,” he says.

“And I’d rather we just pretend it never happened.”

He lets out a long, slow breath.

“Ok.” 

She frowns.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“What?” More firm this time, and his eyes doing this odd bright burning thing that sort of makes her mouth go dry.

“I’ve never seen you admit defeat before.”

He snorts.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Not in my experience.”

“Ok, Johnson.”

And somehow she’s smiling.

Somehow Ben Solo is making her smile.

She turns back to her computer, biting her lip and Ben reads the signal and walks past her to his own.

She copies the message she sent Finn and posts it.

-

The reaction she gets—

Well, it’s not pretty.

_ finn#2187: don’t go on twitter. _

_ rey#7257: ? _

_ finn#2187: just trust me, ok? _

She’s waiting for the bus in the rain, frowning at her phone.

She trusts Finn, and with her life, but now she’s curious. 

Her finger hovers over the app’s button for a whole thirty seconds before someone comes up next to her and she glances sideways out of habit.

“Do you take the bus?” she blurts out.

Ben Solo has a really nice car—a Whisper, Poe had obsessed over it for four whole days.

“Car’s in the shop,” he shrugs.

“And you’re not taking an Uber?” That just felt unlikely.

Ben takes a deep breath. “Look, when I said your writing wasn’t good, I didn’t mean—”

“I thought we’d agreed to drop this,” she said sharply.

“Yeah, I thought we did too, but it’s bugging me, so I’m full on apologizing, ok?” 

Rey lets out a huff of annoyance and pulls out her phone, pressing the Twitter button out of habit, completely forgetting Finn’s warning until it is too late.

_ Guess reyson-detre thinks she’s better than all of us or whatever and her opinion matters more than us _

_ Listen, sis, we’re gonna call it out when you start looking like an abuse apologist _

_ Fucking secret kirandy i’d bet you anything she even writes like them i bet it’s a sockpuppet account for one of their writer trolls _

There are tears in her eyes. Actual tears. Her shoulders are shaking.

She closes Twitter and stares out at the traffic. It’s cold, and still raining. She tries to take a deep breath. She likes the rain. There had never been rain when she’d been growing up.

“Rey?”

“What?”

Ben Solo had been talking the whole time, and there’s a horrified look on his face. Distantly, she’s vaguely aware that she’s never seen him look horrified before. She hadn’t known he was capable of it. 

“I’m sorry, I should have—”

She looks away.

“It’s fine,” she mumbles.

“It’s not.”

“It’s something else.”

“Don’t lie.”

“It is,” she says and now more than any other time she’s tempted to tell him about fic (which she knows he won’t understand) and writing, and fandom, because she’s too raw to make good decisions.

But the bus comes, and he lets her on first and she goes and finds a seat at the back and he finds one midway along the bus and glances back at her once before looking down at his phone.

-

Rey can’t sleep.

She has deleted Twitter from her phone, has tried taking a metric fuckton of melatonin, has gotten up to pee, to drink water, has remade her bed—but it’s still four in the morning and she hasn’t slept.

_ Worthless, worthless, worthless,  _ she thinks, trying to ignore the tweets that had pierced her soul like an arrow. Finn had fought half of the people tweeting at her, she had deleted the post she’d made from her Tumblr and from the author’s note of her most recent chapter, but it doesn’t matter. Her email is full of it, her memory keeps seeing the words blazing black against her screen. And just when she thinks she’s falling asleep, her vivid imagination supplies a new one.

At five in the morning, she gets out of bed. She showers, dresses, and goes to the bus stop to go to work. Work is better than lying in bed thinking about how what she’d tried to build for herself has crashed down around herself.

What if she just deleted everything? What if she just said this wasn’t worth it, and that she never wants to be hungry again, so she’ll do sales for the rest of her life, become as soulless and obnoxious as Ben Solo?

Ben Solo who had at least tried to treat her like a person.

_ Whatever he was right.  _

_ My writing was shitty. _

_ Everyone thinks so. _

Which is how she ends up crying on the bus. It’s not even six am, and there are four other people on it, but she doesn’t know them so she doesn’t care.

She has mildly pulled herself together by the time she opens her computer and checks her email.

She scrolls through idly, ignoring corporate comms that won’t affect her, deleting emails from salespeople who aren’t as good at their job as she is and should know better than to reach out to her with their pitches, and—

_ From: bsolo@fo.com _

_ Subject: Sorry _

_ Dear Rey, _

_ I’m sorry I kept pressing the issue. I’m sorry I said anything at all. I’m sorry I made you cry. I’m sorry you’re stuck with me as a sales partner right now. I’m sorry I said anything critical of your writing. It is good. Your prose is really good. You’ve always had a way with words—it’s what makes you as good at your job as you are. It’s just some of the choices you made were no Solo stop stop stop this is an apology draft even if you were right. Apologize. _

_ God I love you Rey I’m so sorry. _

Rey stares at the last words and rereads the entire email three times.

It was clearly sent in error. That’s the only explanation for the digression halfway through. 

_ God I love you Rey I’m so sorry. _

What?

She stares at it and for the first time since she’d opened Twitter the day before, her head is calm. Love like a friend, right? She tells Finn she loves him all the time.

But somehow she can’t even imagine Ben Solo telling his mom—much less a friend—that he loves her. 

_ He loves me? _

Or maybe he was just trying to put words down to reframe later. Since he likes to critique word choice. This was a draft.

At 7:15am, the email disappears from her inbox, and corporate’s note of  _ Ben Solo has retracted this email _ replaces it.

She should get to work. She came to work to get to work. To take her mind off Fandom.

And Ben Solo managed to do it so unexpectedly. 

Should she email him? Let him know she saw it?

Time ticks on and at eight o’clock, Ben arrives in the office. His eyes snap to hers and she’s too tired to pretend.

“I read it.”

He seems to sag, looking away.

“Right,” he mutters. “I’ll just—”

“Did you mean it?” she asks.

“Can we just pretend it never happened?”

“You’re the one who wouldn’t let me do that in the first place.” 

“Fair,” he grits out. “I would hope by now you’d know I meant it.”

“That you love me?”

He flinches.

“That I’m sorry,” he corrects slowly.

“Yeah, I got that,” Rey replies. “What about that sign-off, Solo?”

He looks like he wants to run, he looks like he wishes he hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning. 

And Rey is so damn tired.

“Ok,” she says slowly. “I get it. No worries.”

And she closes her computer. “I didn’t sleep last night, so I’m working from home,” and she shoves it into her bag and leaves him just standing there as she makes her way back to the bus.

-

She does sleep. From just before nine when she gets home until her buzzer goes off at 12:30, she gets three and a half glorious hours of sleep. 

The buzzer is disorienting. She hasn’t ordered anything and she doesn’t know who would be trying to get into the building at this hour of the day.

When she looks out the window, she sees Ben Solo standing there, three floors below.

Carrying flowers.

Roses. Red ones.

She’s too tired to know if she’s feeling more  _ what on earth _ or  _ oh my god _ but she buzzes him in and a minute later he’s knocking on her door.

“Hi,” she says. He’s not in work clothes. He looks like he showered before coming here because his hair is still a bit damp.

“I do love you,” he says. “And I basically have my head up my ass. And you don’t have to like me back or anything. Here are some flowers. I’m sorry for everything.”

She stares at him and the proffered roses. 

“That was your speech?” she asks him after a good thirty seconds pass. He blinks at her. “I mean the prose was good, but structurally speaking it was lacking.”

She claps her hands over her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say that. She hadn’t.

He snorts and his face melts into this sort of devastating smile, one that softens his face and lightens his eyes—or it does until it fades.

“I shouldn’t have said that. I thought the critique would be helpful. Because you  _ are  _ a good writer and—”

“It was fine,” she cuts in. “I was more mortified that you were even reading my fic.”

He frowns.

“Fic?”

“Fanfiction,” she says. Somehow it’s less mortifying with him standing on her doorstep with flowers. 

“What’s that?”

“It’s…” where to begin. “You write stories about your favorite fictional characters. So I was writing about Kira from—”

“From that movie you like,” he says, looking proud of himself for remembering her, even if he couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

“Yeah, that one. It’s a story where she’s in like...the  _ Space Battles _ universe.”

And confusion crosses his face. She grins.

“But...why?”

“For fun.”

He blinks. 

Why is it that she’s standing here thinking he looks adorable when he looks confused, the way his brow is furrowing, the way his gaze is unfocused, the way the flowers sort of fall sideways in his hand?

Rey bites her lip.

_ You’re tired. _

“Want to come in?” she asks him.

-

They don’t have sex in her apartment, but Rey does think about it. She ends up falling asleep again, her head on his lap, his hands running through her hair as she tells him what feels like everything. He tries to understand fanfiction, and fandom; he definitely understands her abandonment issues, and that almost pathological need to fill this emptiness she has trouble describing.

They don’t have sex later that week, either, when he takes her out to dinner after work, but he does leave a long, lingering kiss on her lips that makes her knees go weak and her heart thud in her chest before putting her in an Uber home.

Maybe it’s because she’s read too much fanfiction, she wonders as she sits in the second seat of the cab, utterly dazed, that her mind had leapt straight to sex instead of things like the way he’d held her hand when they’d left the restaurant, the way his eyes had somehow been his  _ I’ll take everything I want _ sales eyes and also so soft, so beautifull  _ you’re not alone  _ over the candlelight. And the way his lips—soft, plush, made for kissing—had felt against hers…

Ordinarily, when she gets home from things, she finds a fic to read and curls up around her phone until she falls asleep. Tonight, though, she puts her phone by her bed and closes her eyes and…

Ben Solo has been a jackass almost as long as she’s known him and yet she’s imagining him curling around her, his lips against her neck, murmuring words like  _ you matter to me _ into her ear.

It’s a thought that carries her to one of the deepest, most restful sleeps she’s known.

-

_ finn#2187: how you holding up? _

_ rey#7257: i haven’t been online, really. weird stuff going on irl. _

_ finn#2187: oh? _

_ rey#7257: you remember asshole ben at work? _

_ finn#2187: what’d he do now? _

_ rey#7257: he...kissed me. and i liked it. _

She waits a long time for Finn to reply. She wonders if he didn’t have a heart attack at that news. They’d spent lengthy conversations ragging on Ben before. 

_ finn#2187: shit. Good for you. I guess he got a redemption arc? _

_ rey#7257: he’s been really sweet actually. _

_ finn#2187: that’s unexpected _

_ rey#7257: i think the asshole is just a mask. _

_ finn#2187: good for you. i’d been worried because you’d been a bit radio silent.  _

_ finn#2187: a few people started defending you after you hadn’t said anything else just fyi. Not everyone hates you. _

_ rey#7257: thanks <3 i’ll be back when i’m less distracted _

_ finn#2187: sounds like a good distraction, tbh. _

_ rey#7257: it is _

Because it is.

She’s started letting herself notice things like the way Ben’s shoulders taper down to his hips, the way his butt looks in his pants, the way his chest sometimes stretched the buttons of his button down so that they looked at risk of popping off. She lets herself notice how nice and soft his hair looks, starts thinking about how the next time he kisses her, she’s not going to be caught off guard and is going to run her hands through it.

“You are gonna cause an HR intervention,” he says to her quietly on Friday by the coffee machine. Most of their team is finishing up from home—code for fucking off for the weekend—and it’s just the two of them at their row of desks. So what if Rey’s been looking at his butt every time he’s gotten up for a call? It’s a nice butt. She likes how it looks in those slacks.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says, taking a sip of coffee. 

He gives her a crooked smile and there’s a different look in his eyes now than she’s seen before. Something burning and needy.

“Don’t you?” he says and suddenly he’s standing very close. 

A challenge, she knows—to see if she’ll step back, worried that someone else will come into the kitchen and see that he’s hovering over her, his broad chest right  _ there _ . Well, two can play at that game.

She looks up at him, from beneath her lashes and bites her lip and he grabs her hand and is dragging her towards a conference room which is, thankfully, empty. He locks it behind them and then his lips are on hers again, and his hands are running up and down her sides as he pushes her back towards the table.

And he’s everywhere, occupying every ounce of her awareness as her ass hits the wood behind her. Her legs spread in her slacks and he steps between them and his chest is so warm, his breath is so hot and nothing exists in the world beyond him and the way he is almost groaning, almost panting into her mouth.

“Do you have any idea how good your ass is?” he mutters to her, his hands dropping to cup what parts of it they can against the table.

“Yours has been a bit distracting too,” she replies and squeezes him and he groans into her mouth so she does it again, and again, and again. With every movement of her hands over it, she can feel him swelling between them and she has read enough fanfiction to not be surprised that he’s as big as he is. Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised because he’s huge, a veritable redwood of a man, but it’s more that with every fantasy she’s ever written, every fic she’s ever fallen asleep to involves a massive penis and him moaning into her neck.

He is moaning into her neck, like everything she’s ever wanted. His hands are fiddling with the buttons of her shirt and she thinks he’s trying to say things against her neck, thinks he’s trying to say things but he keeps getting distracted by the way her hands are dancing from his ass, to the small of his back, to his chest. 

“Fuck,” he mutters and he stops bothering with the unbuttoning, and just sort of tugs her shirt off her shoulders to reveal her breasts in their really rather ordinary bra. And yet he’s staring at them, his eyes more black than brown, his erection throbbing against her groin and he reaches a hand out slowly, gently, to trace along the top line of her bra. She looks up at him again. His face is contorted with a combination of reverence and want and need and all she can do is bite her lip to keep from laughing at him fondly.

How had she gotten fond of him? How?

His eyes flick to hers and he lets out an honest to god groan. “You have to stop biting your lip.”

“Why?”

“Because then I want to bite it.”

“You should,” she tells him and his lips crash against hers again, his hands cupping her breasts, rubbing them through her bra, and she’s too distracted by his tongue in her mouth—hot and thick and why are words failing her? Why can’t she—he’s just—

Her breasts make their way out of her bra. She missed the exact how of it, though she suspects it has something to do with Ben and his fingers which are now circling the tips of her nipples, tugging them gently as she whimpers into his mouth, and rocks her hips against his erection and now it’s his turn to whimper and groan and—

“No,” because he’s stepping away. Not far away, but his hips aren’t against hers anymore. But her protest is lost a bit in his mouth because his tongue is back, determined to distract her from the ache between her legs. She tries to scoot towards him, but his hand drops to her hip to hold it in place. “Ben,” she whines.

When the hand starts fiddling with the front of her slacks, though, she quietens. She helps him tug them down a bit by wiggling on the table as he pulls at them and then his hand is cupping her sex through her underpants. “This ok?” he breathes.

She nods and he starts to rub.

“Oh.” Breathily, her chest shaking. Even through the cotton, it feels amazing—better than his dick through both of their slacks. His fingers are precise, tactical, and it’s like she can feel them running all over her body, even though he’s got one hand on the table and the other between her legs. She feels hot, her heart is racing, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped kissing her. She’d stopped kissing him. She looks up at him and finds he’s watching her so intently that her stomach lurches.

Fuck.

_ Fuck. _

She doesn’t know what to do with everything, the way his touch is making her feel, the way his eyes are so soft, and deep, and full of her. She feels special. She feels like she can’t possibly deserve this.

And the hand that was on the table comes up and traces her lips for a moment and she kisses the pads of his fingers. “Only good things,” he whispers to her, and she wonders just how much of that was on her face. “Just you and me.”

And she tugs her underpants aside and his eyes close for just a moment as he strokes along her sex. Then he slides a finger into her and curls. 

She didn’t really know when she’d started leaning back on her elbows but suddenly her body feels heavy—too heavy for this angle against her shoulder and she lies back against the table. She’s glad that she did when he slides another finger in. He’s leaning over her now, mouthing at her breasts.

“God Rey. I—you feel—”

“Please—Ben—”

“Rey—Rey—” like a prayer, like gasping for air, “—Rey, I love you so much.”

And it’s like fanfiction. Fanfiction because that’s when you’re supposed to come, right as he’s moaning about how much he loves you and that’s when Rey comes on a table in a locked conference room with Ben’s fingers curled inside her. Everything is warm, and roiling, and yet shockingly peaceful as she sighs and groans and arches and clenches at his fingers, as if no part of her wants him to stop touching her. Her fingers keep clinging to him, as though wholly unwilling to let him go.

They stay like that for a long few minutes, Rey feeling positively melted against the table, warm, and soft, and safe. Her hands keep trailing up and down his spine, higher and lower, until she remembers his hair. How had she forgotten his hair? She’d been determined she’d run her hands through it. So she does now, massaging his scalp, tracing little circles there as he nuzzles at her chest and slowly pulls his fingers out of her.

“That feels nice,” he murmurs, his voice low and gravely.

“That felt nice,” Rey replies and she can feel his lips quirk in a smile against her skin. She lifts her knee slightly, trying to find his erection somewhere out of reach. She brushes against it. “Do you want to—”

“I don’t have a condom,” he says.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t planning this. Or at least—” he pauses briefly, “not like this.”

“This wasn’t planned? I’m shocked.” 

He snorts and she smiles. His hair is so soft. She loves it when he smiles.

“There are other ways we could—”

“I don’t want to make a mess,” he says and it sounds like the words pain him.

“What if you don’t?” she asks him quietly and he frowns. “You clean?”

“Yes—Rey—” in surprise, because she’s gently pushing him off her. She’d wanted to tug his hair while he came, but she’ll save that one for later. Instead she turns him around so he’s leaning against the conference table and she can practically hear him gulp as she sinks to her knees and grabs his belt. 

She looks up at him and he looks almost like he’s going to faint. But he nods and she unbuckles him, unbuttons him, unzips him, and lets his slacks fall down his legs as she tugs him out of his underwear.

He’s long, and thick, and hot, and somehow so soft and so firm all at once. His skin is like velvet, like velour, like silk as she strokes it, but his erection is hard as iron. He groans when she licks her way up the bottom of his shaft, then down again, nuzzling against his balls before drawing one of them into her mouth.

“Jesus Christ,” he grits out as she rubs her tongue gently around it. “God Rey—I—”

She lets him go and licks back along his shaft and this time, this time, she takes him fully into her mouth. He lets out another groan and now his hands are in her hair, pulling it loose from its ponytail as she does her best to suck him down. He hits the back of her throat, and she wishes she didn’t have a gag reflex, but she does so her hands at his base will have to do as she bobs her head, and licks, and smiles because he just keeps moaning. His hands are almost listless against her scalp, sort of drifting, sort of gripping, then letting go as though afraid he’ll pull too hard.

She licks, and licks, drawing his tip against the soft inside of her cheek, one hand toying lightly with his balls while the other grips and rubs his shaft.

“Rey you’re—I—” He keeps trying to talk. Somehow she’s not surprised that he doesn’t know how to shut up even during sex. Where once it might have annoyed her, now she can’t stop feeling warmed by it. “This is—Rey—I—”

She licks along his tip like a lollipop, the sharp tang of his precum somehow tasting better than the dinner he’d taken her to earlier that week. 

She lets him pop out of her mouth just long enough to take a breath, to whisper, “You taste so good,” and he bites his lip, his eyes closed, his hands balled into fists at his side now. “It’s ok. You can let go.”

And he’s gulping as he looks down at her, his eyes bright and it’s almost the second that he’s back in her mouth that he’s coming, hot cum streaking into her mouth, his dick throbbing against her lips until he’s done and she’s swallowing and he’s sagging against the table.

He helps her to her feet before tucking himself back in his pants. She pulls her own back up, puts her tits away, and looks around the room for her ponytail holder, which is around Ben’s wrist. She kisses him as she takes it back.

She meant it to be a quick kiss, but Ben’s hand grabs her waist and he holds her to him as he deepens it, his tongue back in her mouth and Rey lets herself lose track of time.

Oh, this is lovely. This is exactly what she wants.

And when she peeks up at Ben again, she knows he feels exactly the same. It should be terrifying, but really it’s exhilarating.

“Can I take you out to dinner again?” he asks her. “And then maybe take you home with me?”

“I’d like that,” she replies and loses track of time again in Ben’s lips.

**Author's Note:**

> [here i am!](http://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)


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